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Jeff Kennett’s wild suggestion that a woman may, one day, play in the AFL has rightly been ridiculed.
Like his recent attack on the poorer clubs, it seems calculated to bring the soon to be retiring Hawthorn President some media attention, something he has craved throughout a long public career and which he will soon have to do without.
Still, almost no one has taken the time to spell out why the suggestion is absurd.
In part, of course, this is because it’s obvious. No woman (or at least, no woman not born in East Germany) is strong enough to compete in the AFL.
There are some sports where women can compete with men on something approaching equal terms − golf and horse racing are examples − but a contact sport like AFL is not of them.
And yet, Kennett’s call for us to pursue ‘the impossible’ has a long, and very respectable, pedigree. He was paraphrasing John F. Kennedy in 1961, when the latter was announcing the USA’s intention to put a man on the moon.
More fundamentally, Kennett’s call reflects the characteristic modern desire to achieve mastery over nature: in this case, mastery not over our external environment but over ourselves, over the physical limitations we are born with.
This is a desire which, in all other areas of society, is approved and trumpeted. People are told that they can do or be ‘anything’, that there are no natural limits to what they can achieve.
To deny the right of couples, who by nature cannot have children to have them is disreputable.
To suggest that there might be fundamental differences between men and women that are not just physical is downright dangerous for one’s health, as the former President of Harvard Larry Summers found out.
So why then can’t a woman play in the AFL?
Because sport is one of the last bastions of nature in our time, a place where the radical differences between people, including the radical difference between men and women, is still recognized.
Everywhere else, the dogma of equality rules.
But even in sport, there have been cases which have challenged the claim that there are insurmountable natural limits (think of Caster Semenya, Andre Pistorius, even the East Germans), and we should expect more of them in the future.
What if, say, someone born a woman wants to become a man, and receives hormonal treatment? Should she (or he) then be able to compete?
If so why then shouldn’t other people who simply because they were born weak or slow, or like Pistorius have lost limbs, not also be allowed, perhaps with the benefit of drugs or other artificial devices?
The confusion and inconsistency of our attitudes to these questions is nowhere clearer than in the case of Peter Fitzsimons, the interviewer to whom Kennett opened his heart (or his mouth).
Well known for his opposition to all use of drugs in sport, Fitzsimons nevertheless was of the opinion that Pistorious should be allowed to run, on what amount to pogo-sticks instead of legs, in races against able-bodied athletes.
And he did not challenge Kennett about the possibility of a woman playing in the AFL. After all, who wants to be seen to be standing in the way of the aspirations of women or the disabled?
The idea of women competing with men at the elite level (or of women becoming men so they can compete with men, and vice versa) may seem absurd at the moment, but mark my words: you have only heard the first of it.
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